The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Despite the proliferation of electronic accounting systems, some aspects of accounting are still performed manually. For example, when a business organization issues purchase orders for products or services and receives invoices from a vendor, the invoices are sometimes manually verified. For example, accounting department personnel may access a purchase order system and compare product or service description, quantity and price information on a printed invoice to data stored in a purchase order system. If all of the data matches, then the invoice is approved for payment and data from the invoice is entered into an accounting system to enable payment to be made to the vendor. If some of the data on the invoice does not match corresponding data in the purchase order system however, then the invoice is designated as requiring special processing. Special processing may take many forms, depending upon a particular situation. For example, in a situation where an invoice indicates that 100 ordered items were delivered, but the purchase order system indicates that only 80 of the ordered items were delivered, then payment for delivery of the 80 ordered items may be authorized, but not for the remaining 20 items not yet delivered. Manual verification of invoices is labor intensive and prone to error.